Why Are Liberals So Pissed?

Nader Voter - By David ShankboneI am really mystified about the left's level of anger at Obama over this debt deal. Not only do liberals believe the debt deal was an unmitigated disaster (Why? What are the concrete consequences of this deal? I haven't seen anyone explain what specific program, policy, or vulnerable community has been harmed by this deal), but they believe that Obama is actually a closet Conservative!  A sampling of the vitriol from Corey Robin's facebook chat with notable liberals (in all cases they are referring to the President):

Rick Perlstein‎: ”The fellow’s not quite well."

Jay Driskell: "I’d like to think he’s in the thrall of capital, but more and more of me think that he is naive and clueless and out of his depth. That is, if he were in the thrall of capital, that would at least be comprehensible (and reprehensible) to me."

Doug Henwood: "Plus, he needs Wall Street money for a billion-dollar re-election campaign. ... Jay, “If he were in the thrall of capital”? In who else’s thrall is he?"

Jodi Dean: "I’m not sure moderate right fits someone to the right of Nixon and Reagan."

Katha Pollitt: "IMO, he’s weak. I don’t exactly disagree with Doug — clearly, he is Wall St’s man –but I think a more skillful politician, one less in love with being above the fray, could have handled this a lot better and gotten more on the other side."

Adolph Reed: "He’s a one-trick pony, always has been, and that trick is performing judiciousness, reasonableness, performing the guy who shows his seriousness by being able to agree with those with whom he supposedly disagrees and to disagree with those with whom he supposedly agrees. He has never — not at any moment in his political career — stood for anything more concrete than a platitude."

Corey Robin: "I tend to think people like Obama really don’t believe the bullshit they preach; what they do believe is that moderation is the mark of maturity and that Wall Street types are smarter than the rest of us."

Doug: "Corey, the personal angle with O, I think, is the fact that he was nurtured from an early age by elites – fancy universities and foundations and then the Dem leadership. He’s in awe of them, and grateful for all they did. Cf. FDR, who emerged from the elite and had the confidence to challenge them. ... I also wouldn’t go too far with the contentlessness of his reasonableness: it’s always about loyal service to power. Not to belabor the obvious, but it’s extremely useful to the bourgeoisie to have a mixed race, cerebral Democrat imposing the austerity program. I’m reminded of Dinkins telling Wall Street skeptics, who thought he didn’t have the balls to impose austerity after the 80s went poof, back during his first campaign: “They’ll take it from me.”"

On and on, further down the rabbit hole. Beyond confusion that anyone could think these are the simpliest explanations for Obama's performance as President (here's my simple version of Obama: he wants to get liberal stuff done but he's very risk adverse about his election prospects), I just think this is an incredibly disproportionate response. 

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Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

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A Last Word on Liberaltarianism

The debate on "liberaltarianism" all over the Internets has made me realize what really is the main thing separating libertarians such as myself from Joe and his progressive liberal brethren.  A comment from Katherine at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen summarizes how most liberals feel about libertarians, a perception likely to proliferate as libertarianism faces increasingly intense scrutiny from the mainstream, liberal press and the liberal cheap seats crowd starts hurling D batteries in our direction:

I don’t think libertarians believe people exist to serve institutions (that’s more like something libertarians would accuse their opponents of believing). However, they do seem to believe that a certain way of doing things (minimal regulation, minimal government action, maximally free markets) is ideal regardless of whether it makes people better or worse off materially.

In short, liberals and left-wingers tend to see improving people’s lives as the goal and try to find policies that will achieve that, while libertarians have an ideological goal that, for them, takes precedence over whether people are actually better off.

NO!  For the last time NO!  My response to Katherine:

In my opinion, the reason why this portrayal doesn’t really hold up is that liberals never seem to perceive the full extent of the consequences of their direct, goal-oriented policy. A policy may succeed in lowering a particular measured unemployment rate from 10% to 9%, but what is not discussed is how that policy did so. It may be that in some cases, the sum total of energy redirected to a particular cause outweighs the merits of that particular cause. Unanticipated negative effects of policy are always a strong possibility. A liberalism unconstrained by the knowledge that error rates exist is dangerous.

I realized Joe and I have been going back and forth on this topic for as long as we've had the blog.

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Liberalism: The Only Fighting Faith

Christopher Hitchens by EnscepticoI've always thought it was telling that the founding neoconservatives were all apostate liberals.  Their's was a nightmare marriage of the cynical worldview of conservatism with the forward momentum of liberalism and the results were aggressively bad: the Iraq war, the War on Drugs, record deficits to "starve the beast" and the culture war.  Liberalism is dangerous stuff- look no further than the horrors of Communist excess- if not tempered by a restrictive, almost naive, morality.  Neocons were jaded liberals, looking the ugliness of the world in the face and getting "serious."  They thought, maybe crime isn't the result of historical inequality, maybe it's just people making bad decisions they should be severely punished for.  A prison population of millions later, and we are talking about one of their great policy successes.  Nowhere is the embrace of the once unthinkable more apparent than in the muscular foreign policy of liberals who grow up; Christopher Hitchens, Jeffery Goldberg and Peter Beinart all took deep quaffs from that heady cup- Beinart notably in the essay that title this post- but at least Goldberg and Beinart have been chastened by being incredibly wrong headed in their advocacy for war in Iraq, Hitchens remains devoted to military utopianism:

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The Well-Meaning Ethnocentrism of the Left

Don't ask me why, but I regularly receive email petitions from change.org, the left-wing activist organization which is listed in the dictionary as an antonym to the word "thoughtful".  Monitoring the organization's communiques, I believe, will give me advanced notice when liberal overreach means it's time to start running for the hills again.  But enough fun; I agree strongly with the vast majority of change.org's positions: immigrant rights, gay rights, the rights of animals, sustainable farming practices, environmental protection, ending the drug war, reducing America's prison population, etc. it's their methodology which I find repulsive: "activism". 

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It's Perfect Because it Doesn't Exist

by Image EditorCarr asks "Why Should I have to defend Libertarianism?"  Well, because the leading libertarian politician in the country just brought up some ideas that most of the country find pretty abhorrent.  If libertarians want to be taken seriously, then they need to be willing to defend their controversial ideas, not just their good ones (end the drug war already!).  

It's notable that Carr spends most of his post on lead in toys, and completely avoids talking about the issue at hand, the Civil Rights Act.  Lead in toys is a red herring that distracts from the harder to swallow parts of libertarianism.  I can find you lots of examples of areas where libertarianism works, probably even a few where conservatism worked and plenty more where liberalism did the trick, including the Civil Rights Act.  That's how a big messy country works, no one has a monopoly on winning an argument or two.  The problem with Rand Paul, and every doctrinaire ideologue of any stripe, is the insistence that his philosophy is right all of the time.  Because libertarians never get to run the country (or really any country) and make lots of compromises, they have the least counterexamples.

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The Sheer Awesomeness of Adventure Tourism

Yes, elephants are - and should be - a commodity. Photograph by Eric Isselee.Several years ago, before I traveled across the Pacific Ocean to explore Japan, I considered becoming an economics professor, wrote an article on space tourism which appeared in the Duke Journal of Economics, applied for a Fulbright Grant to study economics in the Tanzanian bush, was rejected, and realized a future as an economics professor wasn't meant to be.  But in the process I did almost a year's worth of research into the various forms of tourism and the capacity of tourism revenues to provide economic incentives for conservation in places like East Africa.  I'm still convinced that my project would have established tourism as both an environmental panacea and the key to East African development.

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Being Right, Not Aiming Left

The Market has Spoken. - Image by Wildcat DunnyAndrew Sullivan links to a study that suggest that liberals know less about economics than Conservatives do:

• 67% of self-described Progressives believe that restrictions on housing development (i.e., regulations that reduce the supply of housing) do not make housing less affordable.
• 51% believe that mandatory licensing of professionals (i.e., reducing the supply of professionals) doesn’t increase the cost of professional services.
• Perhaps most amazing, 79% of self-described Progressive believe that rent control (i.e., price controls) does not lead to housing shortages.

Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cohen point out that these are areas where liberals would be more likely to have a bias away from the economic consensus.  In other words, if you took a poll about global warming and used it to determine whether or not conservatives believe in science you might end up with a similar bias.  However, that caution doesn't change the fact that all too often liberal skepticism of market outcomes leads some liberals to undermine their own policy goals and end up on the factually wrong side of positions.

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Liberalism After Liberalism

Tom Friedman thinks that both political parties have succeeded at their historical goals:

If you step back far enough, you could argue that George W. Bush brought the Reagan Revolution — with its emphasis on tax cuts, deregulation and government-as-the-problem-not-the-solution — to its logical conclusion and then some. But with a soaring deficit and a banking crisis caused by an excess of deregulation, Reaganism has met its limit. Meanwhile, President Obama’s passage of health care reform has brought the New Deal-Franklin Roosevelt Revolution to its logical conclusion. There will be no more major entitlements for Americans. The bond market will make sure of that.

In other words, both major parties have now completed their primary 20th-century missions, first laid down by their iconic standard-bearers. The real question is which party is going to build America’s bridge to the 21st century — one that will strengthen our ability to compete in the global economy, while practicing much more fiscal discipline.

 I am a liberal, so it will not surprise what party I think is more likely to realize this new direction.  The fact is, the left has already absorbed the lessons of the right, while the right seems unable or unwilling to declare victory.

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Conservatism Eats Itself

The point of view Texas just correctedThe Texas school board's new curriculum continues the tragic decline of modern American "conservatism" as a movement with intellectual heft and consistency of thought.  Conservatives once imagined that they stood athwart the breach that threatened to replace individualism, inherited values and freedom with the top-down collective conformity of the Soviet Union.  Now, the right indoctrinates the young before college to counter the propaganda of the liberal intelligentsia, brands anyone that opposes extra-legal torture as "soft on terror" and attempts to "bureaucracize" language by calling torture "enhanced interrogation" and capitalism "free-market enterprise."  It is a tragedy that conservatives would embrace propaganda and torture, reducing their legacy of strident opposition to Communism and its evils to froth of partisanship.  Communism was evil because of what it did, not why it did it, if we do evil then we are no better.  If only more people were temperamentally conservative - humble, careful and limited in their approach to politics- rather than ideologically conservative, which amounts to a shopping list of positions their team supports.

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David Brooks Gets Obama, America Right

Kudos to New York Times columnist David Brooks for helping to further catalyze the post-partisanship which the election of Barack Obama represents for some.  Brooks, a moderate conservative, recently wrote a column called, "Getting Obama Right" where he even-handedly castigates partisan portrayals of the President from both sides.  From the right:

Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

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Political Ideology and Morality: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

The first lesson one learns in Statistics 101 is that correlation does not imply causation; that is, if two events seem to follow each other, that doesn't mean they are directly related.  For example, for many years it was believed that children who slept with the light on were more likely to develop myopia later in life.  This correlation seemed to make sense logically, but many years of rigorous study confirmed that myopic children tended to have myopic parents who were more prone to use bright lights across the board.  In this case, bright lights did not cause myopia: it was the other way around.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, fond himself of correlating opposing political ideologies with unpleasant psychological problems, recently wrote a column on research linking conservatism to vulnerability and low tolerance for disgust.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to slap their own fathers.  Kristof references a new database for this sort of psychological research: www.yourmorals.org, which I went to and submitted to several psychological tests.

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Progressives: Where To Begin?

With the most liberal President since Carter in office, huge Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate and health care reform through the House and rounding third in the Senate, progressives should be ecstatic.  Yet, there is a pervading sense of dread and infighting in the liberal community.  For some the problem is waiting for the other shoe to drop.  They were nervous when President Barrack Obama's popularity was down 18% in less than a year and panicking after Republicans won decisive victories in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey; for these progressives there is a sense that it is all too good to be true.  Seeing parallels to 1994 when President Clinton's overreach on health care led to landslide Republican Congressional victories, many progressives now look forward to the midterms in 2010 with trepidation.  For others, the problem is a lack of accomplishment after the supposed realignment of 2008.  President Obama seems poised to send more troops into Afghanistan - hardly a break with the militaristic tendencies of his predecessor.  He also extended the Cuban embargo, has made no progress on overturning the Defense of Marriage Act or "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," iced the Employee Free Choice Act for the foreseeable future and has struggled to pass health care reform - let alone cap and trade - or improve education.  What was all of that work and hope business about - to pass a stimulus package that enriched the banks while unemployment climbs towards 10%? 

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A Response to Jonathan Chait

For years now, people far less libertarian than I have been recommending I read Ayn Rand.  While I admit I have no interest in reading her books, I know enough about the author to find her distasteful, iconoclastic, and hypocritical.  Libertarianism is an ideal which treasures self-governance - that is, personal responsibility for one's actions and the freedom to make really bad mistakes as well as the freedom to believe something stupid.  I was excited when I heard about Jonathan Chait's New Republic trashing of Rand, but after I read the article, I couldn't help but feel angry and offended.

Chait, like many, many political commentators from the left, assumes that libertarianism is a simple, unnuanced ideal, that libertarians are incapable of breaking with dogma, and, in general, are a group of elitists who seek to control the world via some sort of perceived innate ability to be better than everyone else at almost anything.  This is an absurd caricature.  Libertarianism is motivated by different factors for different people, despite the fact that Chait suggests it is a psychological disease resulting from abusive parents!

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